Nicaraguan writer William Alexander González, 22, received this Friday, September 23, the Antonio Carvajal Young Poetry Prize, an award dedicated to the competition of new promises of Spanish and Latin American literature.
“The Nobody” is the title of the work that deserves the award unanimously awarded to the student of the double degree in Language and Literature plus Journalism at the Rey Juan Carlos University. González was born in Managua, but has lived in Spain since he was 11 years old. His mother migrated to that European nation in search of better life opportunities.
«First of all, I would like to thank the jury for having considered my work worthy of this award, because for me it will be an honor that my first work, even though I do not know if there will be more, has been awarded under the name of a poet as accomplished as Antonio Carvajal”, the poet referred during the delivery of the XXV edition of the prize.
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As for the creation process, González expressed that “this book, The Nobody, is a work that I wrote for the most part between the ages of 11 and 17, since since my uncle died (who was a father to me) back in 2018 I hardly write and my literary vision – vital has taken other directions. It is worth remembering that we are readers before poets or writers».
«In The Nobody you will find a young man who leaves his homeland. A triangle in the middle of Central America that has given so many lyrophores to the world: Rubén Darío. Ernesto Cardenal, (José) Coronel Urtecho, Gioconda Belli, among others. A child who played at being a poet with his mistakes, his metrical catastrophes whose chest was full of nostalgia. A boy who arrived in Spain and began to look. And looking at him he fell in love with “The Nobody”. And if you wonder: *Who are the Nobodys? The Nobodys are those who cost less than the bullet that kills them, as Galeano would say,” added the young writer.
He highlighted the desire that his poetry be known for «being at the side of the immigrant and his uncertainty, of the mother who abandons her children in search of a better future to later meet them abroad. If I want you to know my poetry for something, it is for being next to the marginalized, the humble, the undocumented immigrant who is branded as “illegal” for working with dignity in a country that did not see him born».
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The jury that gave the Nicaraguan as the winner was made up of poets, writers and professors. Antonia Guerrero Marfil, Councilor for Culture of the Albolote City Council (Granada, Spain); Jesús Munárriz, director of Ediciones Hiperión; the literary critics Antonio Sánchez Trigueros and Antonio Chicharro Chamorro; the poets Francisco Castaño and José Antonio Ramírez were in charge of evaluating the works and defining the winner of the award.
The members of the jury highlighted that “Los Nadies” gathers a “lyrical roots, musically heir to that of his compatriot Rubén Darío, rooted in contemporary social reality, which the author knows very closely: emigration, poverty, uprooting, marginalization, obstacles bureaucratic, hard work, the real world, with its pressing and universal urgencies and needs, which does not seem to concern or interest other poets of his age».
The experts cataloged the winning work as “a book that names, among others, whom others call Menas (Unaccompanied Foreign Minors), and does so with as much truth as beauty.”
Dedicate award to exiles
González dedicated his award to the community of Nicaraguans exiled in Spain after the increase in repression in their country of origin since 2018 by the administration of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
“I would like to dedicate this award to the more than 60,000 Nicaraguans who reside in Spain. To all the exiles (writers, journalists, poets, cultural managers) who have had to leave their country for believing in freedom of expression and, above all, in the power of the word”, he stressed.
The young man expressed his gratitude that «if I want someone to read my poetry for someone, it is because I don’t ignore those who are called “Menas” as if they had no name, my friend José who tells me that he is proud to be a gypsy and, knowing that I won the prize, he told me that he hadn’t read a book in decades, but he would read mine with pleasure because he felt represented in each verse. The Nobodys are all of them. Born, raised and developed in a marginal neighborhood of Madrid where poetry does not arrive, but this book has arrived despite the fact that the years condemn them to marginalization and abandonment».
The endowment of this award is 1,202 euros for the winner, the edition of the winning work in the Hiperión publishing house and the delivery of 50 books. The prestigious award was created in 1997 by the Department of Culture of the Albolote City Council to promote young poets and give them the opportunity to publish their works through Editorial Hiperión.
